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How He Became the Greatest

By

Allen Barra

Updated Oct. 21, 1998 12:05 a.m. ET

I n the late 1970s it was common for journalists to refer to Muhammad Ali as "the most written about human being who ever lived," having surpassed, by the time he won his third heavyweight title in 1978, Lincoln, Christ and Napoleon. (Of course, that was before Vanity Fair discovered Madonna.) One boxing pundit estimates that Ali has inspired no less than 50 books.

How amazing, then, that Muhammad Ali still seems an enigma. As Garry Wills once wrote, Ali was the "intellectual's catnip"; Norman Mailer,...